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Jen Kirkman

It’s condescending to tell a childless woman she’d “be a great mom”

This statement is at best condescending and at worst, patently false and potentially dangerous. It’s like telling a friend who you know has a paralyzing fear of wild animals that she would make a great game warden. Seriously, she should just shake off her deep-seated anxiety about being around rhinos and lions and just go out there and guide some poor innocent family on a safari. I’m sure you’ll do fine! …

When we were married, Matt and I often told people that we were a family, just the two of us. That sentiment felt secure and it was true. We were legally a family. But people who had kids usually just looked at us with pity—the kind of pity I reserve for people who are folding and unfolding strollers and clumsily going through airport security.

I knew that people stared at us and thought, But you can’t have a two person family. What if one of you falls off of a boat when you’re on vacation? Then what? A family of one? What good is a family of one? If you’re the only one in your family then who do you blame for all of your mistakes? No, it’s YOUR fault that I dropped the carton of orange juice that I was drinking from while standing in front of the open refrigerator because you walked into the kitchen on your tip-toes. You KNOW that when you try to walk quietly it scares me more than if you just walked normally. Also, I had a bad day at work and I blame you because if it wasn’t for you, I’d have more free time to meet the heir to an oil empire and if HE married me—I’d never have to work again! I’m not feeling good about myself but I’m too afraid to look within so I’m just going to fixate on the fact that your toothbrush is on the top of our toilet tank.

I imagine if Matt had come home every night and said to me, “Oh Jen, but you’d be such a good cook,” our marriage would have broken up a lot faster than it did.

Blowback

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Some women such as the one quoted from this article are not “belittling the child-rearing [their] body was designed for,” so much as they are tired of society expecting and demanding that all women live life a certain way (e.g., get married, have a kid), and if they do not do these things, they get accused of being feminists, man-haters, freaks, selfish, filled with “self hatred,” and all the other crap one sees being spouted by most people in this thread.

Uh, no. Everyone is free to make their own choices. But I’ll tell you one thing I know. I know that a friend saying “Aw, but you’d make a great Mom” implies nothing but good intentions. While it may be annoying to the recipient, it would be no less rude to say so as it would be to have said it in the first place (if it good intentions can ever truly be “rude”). What is most ASSUREDLY rude, however, is then writing a self-absorbed national column about it.

Everyone is free to make whatever choices they want. They are also free to STFU about it, too. THAT is where people are taking her to task. Lecturing people about this in a column is many orders of magnitude worse than the allegedly insult she received in the first place. Call it hypocritical, call it whatever you want. Nobody should have any sympathy for the woman taking to the national media to complain about something to stupid.

What’s also pretty much a universally accepted fact is that children ARE a blessing. Everyone saying what her friend said is proceeding from that belief AND from a superficial evaluation of someone’s actual skill and aptitude for parenting.

My problem with her is not that she doesn’t want children, but that she looks down on women who have children.
She says she feels “pity” for them, because they don’t move as elegantly through airport security as she does. That’s snotty.
Gelsomina on April 26, 2013 at 1:37 AM

Read the entire thread w/ great interest; lots of good comments. The author sounds bitter and agree w/ others above she’s got issues with the fact of her personal childlessness or she wouldn’t be so defensive about well meaning compliments.

And my gentle feedback/unsolicited advice for TigerPaw:

I can’t imagine writing your post, because to be honest you sound very angry. I don’t have any children. I love them and love spending time around them. For religious reasons I never married and I spend my time either helping my sister with her young children, or serving at several local (Catholic) churches, and I love my life. I’ve always been treated with respect by anyone at any church I’ve attended (and due to moves, it’s been many).

If you are already serving at your church I recommend more (especially with needy people as opposed to, say, the choir) and if you are not I recommend you start. You will soon be so busy helping others you won’t have time for self pity, or anger. And if someone says to you at some point, “you’d make a great mom” you can smile and sincerely say “thanks!” for their compliment. Your “cult” strawmen aside, I’m sure there is the occasional insensitive person (and to them you can smile pleasantly and joke, “why, someone from the church will be wiping my butt in the nursing home!” –the true answer being “God will take care of whatever needs I have at that age and He is very trustworthy”)

But looking to be insulted is no way to go through life. If your church truly is that bad, you need to go find another one — I’d bet the one right next door will be different, if you change your attitude, that is.

This woman sounds awful and I fully support her decision to never procreate as well as release her former husband back into circulation where he can find a real wife. Also, someone writing a book about how great it is to be childless who is offended whenever anyone takes a contrary position — didn’t we just read an article like this a few weeks ago? Same woman, or is this suddenly a hot topic among the 30-something liberal set?

I know a woman who has a business, a husband, and three grown daughters and one granddaughter. She once told me that if she could go back in time and do it all over again, she wouldn’t get married and wouldn’t have kids. As much as she loves her husband and kids, she felt that what she got out of that life, wasn’t as much as it cost her.

The problem is that people get married and have kids when they are young and stupid. If many of those people could do it all over again, and if they are truly honest with themselves, they would choose a different path in life.

But a female’s need to nest is nature’s ruse to keep the species going. But when that female is young, she doesn’t realize it’s a ruse. It’s only when she is 60-something and still working to pay bills and with adult children still living at home that she regrets that her life didn’t take the path she really wanted.

It’s not only condescending, rude, and snotty, to some women it’s downright agonizing to hear because they aren’t in a position to have kids and desperately want them. And that goes up to eleven if they physically CAN’T have kids.

Seriously rightwingers, show a little courtesy for people who don’t want to follow your Lifescript, or even for people who want to but are unable!

I read her entire article, and I’ve read the comments in this thread. And the two conclusions I can draw are this:

- I can muster no anger, nor hatred, nor anything else for this woman that people in the thread are accusing those who disagree with this woman of. The only thing I can bring myself to feel for her is legitimate pity and, in that, she is correct. She is obviously such an unhappy, bitter person. Trying desperately to convince herself, and the world, that she is not.

- Our culture is so ridiculously self-absorbed. Somewhere along the way, we forgot the fact that life is not about “me, me, me.” Largely, I think that comes from our abandonment, as a culture, of God. But there are other aspects as well. Life is not about looking back in your old age and seeing what you “got out of it.” And as much as one poster wants to call the female nesting instinct a “ruse,” the truth is that in old age, more women who took the feminists’ prescribed path look back with regret than do those who have husbands, children, grandchildren, and overall happy families.

She makes it completely obvious that she’s unwanted – IN HER OWN WORDS!

Do you seriously even CARE how painful this nonsense is to someone who’s hurting?

Obviously, it’s not too painful for her to publicly write about it, but it’s funny that her sophomoric prose (her mother-in-law holding the neck of a celery stalk hostage – really? – she thought this was clever?) made your heart bleed. Please…

In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes that “Now to the unmarried and the widows I saw: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.”

Paul was just full of good advice! Am I selfish because I am a single, childless 31 year old woman with no immediate desire to settle down and have children? Maybe. Maybe I’ll regret that choice. Or maybe this is the path God has intended for me.

If you ask me, her main problem is caring too much what society thinks about her choices.